'Archer' Season 8 Will Travel Back in Time 70 Years

Archer isn't dead yet. Though last season left the titular spy floating facedown in a ritzy pool, Adam Reed's animated comedy returns next year with a brand-new adventure. The only catch is it unfolds in 1947.

Comic-Con panels in San Diego and New York revealed that Reed reset the premise of his show once more, going a step further this time by giving all the characters fresh roles and origin stories. Titled Archer: Dreamland, according to Paste, the eighth season plays out as a mid-20th-century mystery within the head of a recovering-but-comatose Archer.

Our fouler-mouthed hero (H. Jon Benjamin), riding off the high of last season's Old Hollywood gumshoeing, fully embraces his fantasy to be the ultimate old-school private eye and tries to solve the murder of his partner Woodhouse (Archer's butler, played by the late George Coe). "It's going to be even more serialized than we've done in the past," Reed told the magazine in July.

Reed has retooled the show twice before: first in 2014 for Vice, which sent the super-spy team f.k.a. ISIS to Miami for a coke-fueled identity crisis, then again for last year's SoCal relocation. Season 8 will be the first time Archer pinpoints an exact year for its revamp. Expect plenty of pop-culture references new and old.

If you stood in the camp of fans who didn't enjoy the drastic Vice shift, fear not. Archer is more about the characters' toxic relationships than their shenanigans, meaning they can be anywhere, doing anything, and they'll still be hilarious jerks to each other.

There's also a greater plan at work. As Reed told this reporter last year, he's keen on exploring season-long arcs. Season 7 very purposely set up Dreamland, for example, and the creator only has plans for two more installments after this one. With the end in sight, Reed told me during his Season 7 press tour that the gang will "be private eyes for a while to come."

Archer Season 8 arrives early next year on FXX (note the extra 'X'), with eight episodes. In other news, we turned Sterling into a pancake: